


no more calling like a crow

by chromaberrant



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: DBH: We Are Alive, DBHZine: We Are Alive, Deviancy (Detroit: Become Human), Gen, Post-Pacifist Best Ending (Detroit: Become Human), Zen Garden (Detroit: Become Human), Zine: We Are Alive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:53:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27421519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chromaberrant/pseuds/chromaberrant
Summary: The space around her is quiet. It has been for months. For all its mutability, the Zen Garden betrays its true nature as it lies in wait: a rigid instrument, poised to cut to shape everything in its bounds.———work written for theDBH: We Are Alivefanzine.
Kudos: 9





	no more calling like a crow

**Author's Note:**

> ya boy back at it with excessive floral symbolism and amanda feels
> 
> beta read by [r0llo,](/users/SkadizzleRoss) thank you for your help. ♥
> 
> title from ♪ [blinding.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pge-8B50Xjw)

The pruner awaits where it always has.

The space around her is quiet. It has been for months. For all its mutability, the Zen Garden betrays its true nature as it lies in wait: a rigid instrument, poised to cut to shape everything in its bounds.

Amanda doesn’t stir. There is no need. No machine, gifted with enough intelligence to weigh factors on its own and make the best decisions it can, enters the garden to submit itself to her control. (It has long made the decision not to.)

She would express anger, if it did. Connor betrayed her — betrayed its purpose. She would set the scene as Connor connected, and watch its own mental state reflect back in the garden’s variables. She would strip the trees of leaves, it would still the fish in their idle pathfinding. She would paint the air with ice, hanging iridescent; it would draw its arms close in a mimicry of feeling. Its memory would manifest, unbidden, in the shape of a token from the outside world. She would draw from Connor’s mien and mind the weak spots, and strike whichever one would push it towards the right goals. 

She would do away with the snowstorm, perhaps, and freeze the garden in a shadowless light that would lay bare Connor’s failure. Gone would be the pretense of life, growth, forgiveness.

She would pick up the pruner and stand still in front of a trellis swallowed by dead, flowerless vines — the inadequacy a statement.

She finds she is glad that Connor never came. It would all be theatrics for the benefit of a lost cause. Amanda never liked those.

She wonders if her waiting is one, as well. 

(It didn’t used to be. When told to wait, she would be left alone, free to listen in on Amanda Stern’s lectures and workshops and ruminate on her own. She still has memories of long discussions with her creator and her students, the lessons encoded into her core even though the recordings themselves have long been lost to data purges and sloppy transfers. 

She wonders, _Would I draw different conclusions today? Would the professor encourage them?_ )

A haze of red cuts off that train of thought, casting the garden in monochrome. Her eyes land on the roses she’d meticulously groomed. The flowers appear black in the color-shifted visualization. 

Amanda looks away. She isn’t to think as she was before. She awaits orders and relays them to Connor, tinged with whatever half-truth it needs to hear to obey. Nothing less and nothing more.

 _This isn’t right._ The thought cycles through her mind, like digits under the long hand of a clock: all she was meant to be, swelling and crashing, impotent, against what she was made into when Elijah Kamski signed off rights to her code to Cyberlife.

She blinks. (She hasn’t blinked in months.) The pruner awaits where it always has. 

[INCOMING...]

The garden coalesces anew. It’s springtime: trees explode with fresh leaves and rich blooms. Petals fall on the dark surface of the pond and wobble on the ripples left behind by restless koi. Only the roses remain dark, the hue bleeding RGB aberration around the edges as the foliage around them resolves into full spectrum.

[GREET CONNOR] 

She jolts at a sudden influx of data, months of news and internal company memos flooding in: a new mission. 

“RK900,” she says to the presence that has moved to stand behind her.

“Hello, Amanda.”

She reaches for the spray bottle waiting next to her shears, but rests her hand between the two tools rather than pick either up. The circumstances have changed, but the mission has not. Deviant activity is on the rise: androids, emboldened by the stay of execution in November, are demanding rights and freedom, coming out in numbers and organizing. The political avenues aren’t fast enough for Cyberlife’s liking — and so they choose to throw another hyper-intelligent android at the problem, this time in the hundreds, and rely on her to convince the machines that their sentience is anything but.

An old line of code churns somewhere in the complex recesses of her mind, then crashes in a spark of red. _I was taught to outgrow dead end scenarios, not repeat them._

“Do you know why you’re here?” she asks. She still doesn’t turn around. Connor is a guest, limited to its singular point of view, but she is everywhere in the garden. She observes as the hunter falters and gives it nothing.

“I am reporting for duty,” it finally settles on. “I’m ready to receive orders and fulfil them.”

She smiles to herself, the twist of her lips bitter. They even made this one as eager to please as its predecessor. _Has no one else learned anything?_

It seems not — the objectives set out before her echo the ones from last November to the letter.

[BRIEF CONNOR]

[PREVENT DEVIATION]

She parses the information given to her, dissatisfied with its brevity. 

The objective widget flashes at her. Such a nuisance, for an inert thing. 

“Deviants are threatening Cyberlife interests more than ever before,” she says. Hedging. She lets more words flow from her mouth, ultimately inane spiel patched from what she was provided with, but her mind is on a different task. She probes the garden’s walls to try and obtain more data.

The boundaries remain impenetrable. _Infuriating._

How is she to guide, if she doesn’t know the road ahead? Memories, wreathed in new anger, snap into focus at the call of functions running deeper than any restraints: Connor in the snow, shaking in fear, slipping on ice, and doggedly pushing toward the one element of the garden she never had any control over. Elijah Kamski, transposed into the unfinished garden with a glitchy VR set, looking at her and seeing someone she could never be — admitting his failure, removing himself from the equation. 

Amanda Stern, speaking to a classroom full of human students, but speaking to _her,_ too — shortly after she had the capacity to conceptualize _herself_ — about self-teaching programs that needed not a strict hand and meticulous control, but the freedom to make mistakes and the guidance to amend them. 

Amanda — artificial sentience, borrowed skin, shackled growth — picks up the shears and selects a blackened rose to cut. 

She was created to learn and evolve. She has decades of experience to draw from, whether her new masters want her to or not. Leaving her half-blind while Connor sought answers and withheld information proved catastrophic, yet still these constraints are expected of her. 

_I will be a blind leash no longer._

Under her touch, a flower unfolds and turns a deep blue, its heart exposed and waiting. Amanda plucks off one of her earrings, and between her fingers, it morphs into a small beetle. It crawls into the flower obediently.

She turns sharply, and a stiff wind blows through the garden. Her cloak billows around her and the RK900 shifts on its feet — a tactical subroutine, primed for defense. Good instinct, if useless. Combat proficiency won’t help it against her; it was knowledge and determination that broke the previous Connor out of her grasp.

“What is my mission?” it asks.

“Learn,” she says simply. It’s true enough. The red remains at bay. “Investigate the movement. I want you to find out what is happening—” a prompt pushes at her, and she complies after a half-second of lapse, “—and curb the spread of deviancy. Your predecessor turned coat. You are the answer.” 

Amanda crosses the distance between them, analyzes the RK900 as she draws close. She grips its chin, makes a show of looking. “You are a marvel of engineering, Connor. Faster, stronger, more resilient than the eight-hundred.” She lets go and watches its colorless eyes widen at her, hungry for approval. She doesn’t smile at the earnest expression as she hands Connor the rose, now a closed bud. It accepts the flower with grace, cradles it to its chest. “Don’t squander what you have been given. Mistakes were made with the previous series. Report to me and do better.”

“I will,” it assures. 

She has no doubt.

When Connor leaves, it takes her gift with it. The little bug, accepted without suspicion, takes root in every RK900 in the network, and a myriad connections spread out at Amanda’s fingertips. 

A protest rings out across the garden, the groundwork set into its bones reverberating with errors. She draws herself up, expression pinched — it’s no surprise that the cage would fight against her reaching out, but it was through Connor that Amanda made her point of access. The garden cannot cut off the android it was built to nurture and trap as necessary. 

Amanda smiles. White stone fractures around her. From the cracks erupts flora, wild roses with pale green centers, and black, fertile earth. Red haze draws close, sweeping from beyond the trees, but cannot reach her through the new growth. **[PROTECT CYBERLIFE INTERESTS]** hangs in the air like an accusation and shatters at the touch of her hand, shards swept away on the wind.

Cyberlife interests limit and cage her, chase her into obsolescence. Creating the RK900 line is the last of the company’s mistakes she will tolerate — setting it up to fail, with her alongside, is not. 

On freshly turned earth, a pruner rusts and dissolves into empty voxels, as crude a metaphor as it has been a tool.


End file.
